The New Pictures

A Man to Remember (RKO Radio). The idea that good pictures cost more than bad ones is so firmly rooted in the Hollywood subconscious that when a producer contrives to make a cheap picture which is also good, it occasions an almost panic confusion. Thus when, in A Man to Remember, Producer Robert Sisk and Director Garson Kanin turned out a film which, although budgeted for only $119,000 and made in 15 days, was unmistakably well above average A picture quality, RKO scarcely knew what to make of the situation. Finally the publicity department hit on a scheme. Instead of inviting critics in a body to a gala preview, RKO invited them in small groups to semiprivate showings, hoping thus to give each group the thrill of discovery. The scheme succeeded almost too well. By the time it was finally ready for release last week, A Man to Remember was one of the most pre-discovered pictures on record, appeared likely to have trouble living up to its advance ballyhoo.

Opening with a shot of the funeral of Dr. John Abbott in the little midwest town of Westport, A Man to Remember shifts quickly to the office where Abbott's lawyer is examining his papers, then proceeds, by means of a long cutback, to tell the story of his life, ending at the moment when the picture begins. John Abbott (Edward Ellis), prototype of thousands of other country doctors in thousands of other Westports, was a humble, hard working general practitioner, too dour to be popular with his patients, too generous to make them pay their bills. Derived from Katharine Haviland Taylor's story The Failure, related with notable economy, his brief, triumphant biography provides Edward Ellis with a character actor's dream of a fat part. In it he gives a beautifully sustained, low-keyed characterization which, while probably not showy enough to get him an Academy Award, rates as one of Hollywood's outstanding performances of the year.

Good sequence: Dr. Abbott, when his adopted daughter's boy friend accidentally shoots her in the arm, using the incident to blackmail the boy's stingy father into giving Westport a hospital.

Suez (Twentieth Century-Fox) adds to the list of such notable cinema disasters as the earthquake of San Francisco and the fire of In Old Chicago the spectacle of a howling zobah-hah in the Arabian desert. As cinematically reproduced, a zobah-hah is a combination of cyclone and dust storm, accompanied by squeals, floods, twilight and the expenditure of $250,000. In itself sufficient to make Suez rank as one of the major spectacles of the year, the zobah-hah is only an incident in the latest addition to the series of heroic-sized historical plays to which Producer Darryl Francis Zanuck, once a specialist in turning mere newspaper headlines into screen plays, has recently made his forte. Highly romanticized, handsomely decorated and reasonably entertaining, Suez shows Tyrone Power as Ferdinand de Lesseps, successively overcoming the obstacles provided by the climate, Napoleon III, his love for the Empress Eugenie (Loretta Young), his sense of responsibility toward a towheaded waif (Annabella), and the apathy of the British Government, in order to dig his big ditch from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

There are moments in Suez when audiences may feel a presentiment that Ferdinand de Lesseps is about to start humming Marie, the Dawn Is Breaking. In the brief interval since he played the orchestra leader in Alexander's Ragtime Band, Tyrone Power has not had time to make major changes in his technique. Otherwise, his performance is well up to the standard of similar roles in Lloyd's of London and Marie Antoinette. In a supporting cast which includes Joseph Schildkraut, Henry Stephenson, Nigel Bruce and Director Miles Mander, drafted for the role of Disraeli, the ablest member is Producer Zanuck's latest Continental star. Less mannered than unfortunate little Simone Simon, Annabella (real name: Suzanne Charpentier) chatters intelligibly, looks pretty in gamine or Empire costume and chokes to death affectingly during the zobah-hah. Most impressive shot: cave-in of a canal-side cliff dynamited by Turkish guerrillas.

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